Les Animaux modèles, Suite for Orchestra, FP 111

Program notes

About the Work

Les Animaux modèles (The Model Animals) was Poulenc’s third and final ballet, composed between 1940 and 1942, that is, in defeated, occupied France. Its scenario, devised by the composer himself, brings to the stage six fables of Jean de La Fontaine, transposed to a country estate in rural Burgundy: the action runs from daybreak, as the estate wakes, to the midday meal that gathers everyone together. Poulenc completed the piano score in September 1941 and the orchestration between October 1941 and June 1942.

The premiere took place at the Paris Opéra on 8 August 1942, with choreography by Serge Lifar (who also danced) and Roger Désormière conducting. The circumstances gave the work a hidden edge: with German officers sitting in the audience of the occupied capital, Poulenc smuggled into his score the melody of the old revanchist song ‘Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine’ (‘You shall not have Alsace and Lorraine’), a gesture of quiet defiance that the occupiers failed to notice. Arthur Honegger, reviewing the score, remarked that the many influences audible in it had been so completely assimilated that the result was simply ‘Poulenc’.

The composer later extracted the six-movement orchestral suite heard tonight: Le petit jour (Daybreak), Le lion amoureux (The Lion in Love), L’homme entre deux âges et ses deux maîtresses (The Middle-Aged Man and His Two Mistresses), La mort et le bûcheron (Death and the Woodcutter), Les deux coqs (The Two Roosters), and Le repas de midi (The Midday Meal).

What to Listen For

The suite is a portrait gallery, and each panel has its own colour. Le petit jour is dawn music: soft, luminous scoring for a large orchestra used with chamber-music delicacy as the estate stirs to life. Le lion amoureux gives us La Fontaine’s lion who falls in love and lets his claws be clipped and his teeth be filed for the sake of a shepherdess: the music is grandly passionate, and all the funnier (and sadder) for taking the lion’s ardour seriously. L’homme entre deux âges is a comedy of vanity: a man between two ages courts two mistresses, one young, one older, and each plucks out the hairs that displease her (the young one the grey, the older one the dark) until he is bald; Poulenc gives the scene a suave, mock-elegant gallantry.

La mort et le bûcheron is the emotional centre of the suite, and the place to hear Poulenc’s other face. An exhausted woodcutter calls for Death; when Death actually appears, he hastily explains that he only wanted help lifting his load. The music here is grave and processional, with a darkness that has more to do with the France of 1940 than with La Fontaine’s world. Les deux coqs is the showpiece: two roosters battle over a hen in brilliant, strutting combat music. Listen for the orchestral crowing and the swagger of the victor (whose pride, in the fable, promptly costs him everything). Le repas de midi rounds the day off with the warmth of a shared table, recalling music from the dawn scene as the frame closes. Throughout, listen for the Poulenc trademarks: razor-sharp wind writing, sudden swerves between music-hall cheek and genuine tenderness, and melodies that sound as if they had always existed.